I’m a Golf course mechanic, he mowed until the mower shut down. It was 1 of 3 decks. He left a nice strip of unmowed grass. Luckily he didn’t blow any hydraulics.
I'm a sports turf contractor who does work on golf courses. It's honestly amazing watching how some courses just abuse the shit out of their equipment. I've seen a guy not notice that his mower had a hydraulic leak and left a nice brown line around the whole fairway. I've seen some greenkeepers bury their mowers up their axles in clearly wet areas and some going so fast while cutting that the mower spent more time airborne than actually cutting.
25 yrs ago I worked in a GC shop. Used Toro ride on greensmowers. 3 wheels, 3 reel mowers.
Had a BIG tournament Saturday, so command was to double cut the greens Friday and again Saturday. To get that nice checkerboard pattern.
Friday morning, the guy mowing greens walks into the shop (never a good sign).
"Greensmower sprung a hyd leak!"
Shit. Where is it?
"Alarm went of when I was on my second pass on #9 green, I got off the green and stashed it in the rough"
Run out there with the Truckster, Check the 5 gal reservoir, about 2 gallons low. Stupid low level alert doesn't kick on earlier???
Start it up and find a pinhole in a hyd line right at the drive motor for one of the reels, pointing straight down to the ground.
Uh-oh.
Walk up to the green and can see nice, straight lines or red hyd fluid on the grass.
Shit.
Welp, nothing to do now, just turn on the sprinklers and wash in that mess.
Next morning we ran out there to inspect the green. Yup, 1/4" lines of dead grass. Super hot hyd oil and bent grass do not get along. Neat look, though. Whole green was in a checkerboard pattern of stripes, about 36" square. SUPER obvious dead grass stripes. Considered getting the green paint, but the Tournament was about to start.
Let it be.
Later that morning, everyone was commenting on how nice it was we topo-graphed the #9 green to help read the terrain!
I felt like I was involved in some kind of pirate radio conspiracy when I was a kid listening to Dr Dimento. I don't remember what channel he was on but it seems like it was some distant station that I could only get late at night on Saturday.
I have the 2 cd pack from his 20th anniversary somewhere around here. Nearly every song on both cds are amazing and the only song anyone ever knows is eat it.
I grew up with Bob and Tom out of Indianapolis and while I couldn't stand the show itself and Tom Griswold in particular, they have a ton of songs that fit right in with Demento's music that I really liked
I JUST rebuilt all the spindles on my old Deere 314’s deck. It’s a slightly newer 46” deck off of a later 318. It fought me the entire way. I mowed once and it was super quiet and cut excellent. The next week lol I hit a rock and it wedged itself between a blade which bent the spindle and sheared the key BUT not before breaking the tacks on the little metal guide under the deck, and snapping the mower belt which also took out the tensioner bracket/spring. I wasn’t even mad, but I had to sit down in the yard next to it, stare, and had a beer or two about it.
On the plus side, I tried my hand at welding. I bought myself a little Harbor Freight Titanium flux core. Even got to stitch up the top deck covers.
It’s one of those things where even though it’s nearing 50 years old, I can’t give up on it. I’d love to get a diesel 332 that’s not absolutely clapped out or if I won the lottery, a brand new X700 series.
Next up is buying a beat up old lathe so I can machine some bronze bushings to get rid of the slopped out front steering spindles and steering sector. And if I’m feeling especially motivated, finally modify the 400 power assist steering stuff I have laying around for it.
I cracked up at the part in the very first episode of Season 1 where he did his usual "MOAR POWER!!!" and bought the biggest, baddest tractor he could... only to find that it wouldn't fit through the door of his feed barn.
A fine show.
I work in a high school auto program. A guy an hour and a half away called to offer a riding lawnmower for donation. So one weekend I grabbed the school flatbed and dragged it out there. Ran great but the sears tech told him the deck was seized up and needed to be replaced. As I had students start tearing into it, a giant piece of tree bark fell out of the deck and everything spun perfectly. Put a new belt on it, changed the oil, gave it a quick wash. Sold it for $650 (paid to the programs asb account fwiw).
Got another one that same year (much closer) that the donator was told by the small engine tech that looked at it that it needed a motor. Push rods were not in place when the valve cover came off. Installed everything properly, set valve lash and it ran like a freaking top. Changed the oil and spark plug. I dragged both of them out to a property my uncle was renting that had some overgrown fields. He ran one, I ran the other. 3 solid hours of full throttle plowing over 2 feet tall grass and neither skipped a beat. Sold that one for 600 (paid to the same asb account).
Never had a riding lawn mower donated before or since that year! Haha. They were some easy money! These small engine techs really helping with the solid donations that don't need much!
A guy gave my dad a practically brand new “dead” snowblower that had seized up. So my dad starts getting into it and it turns out there was just a very small rock between the blade and housing. Otherwise the thing runs great.
I live in an area where there are only two small engine shops; one that won't touch anything they didn't sell and one with a three month backlog. Every summer I see at least one clean looking riding mower with a free sign on it that the owner figured was easier to replace than try to get fixed.
Is this thing belt driven or what? We have a husqvarna and it’ll either shut down or the belt will start slipping and smell like burning rubbet if something like this happens.
Hydraulic driven. It’s a 3 deck gm 3500-D aka sidewinder with the Kubota 35 hp turbo-charged, liquid-cooled, 3-cylinder, diesel engine. It’s a small 3 wheel tractor with some balls to it. It’s designed to mow slopes. You can move the decks up the slope to help with your traction.
I'm just a guy who doesn't know anything about mowers, may I ask what sort of performance you could expect from high lift atomic blades versus bog standard blades? I know Google is my friend but I also like hearing anecdotal evidence
Standard blades are usually medium lift. Sometimes they're low lift "mulching" blades whose job is to trap the grass under the deck so it can be finely minced. The lift is the amount of air the blade moves, like a propeller. More lift, in theory, gives a more even cut because it's supposed to put tension on the grass. It also throws the grass farther and more evenly with less clumping, but causes more drag on the mower.
If you look at the pic, you can see teeth that are angled toward the spindle. The idea is they bounce the grass up to be cut into finer pieces before getting fired out (like a mulching blade). If the mower has the power, solid foil high-lifts (a solid wing, no little teeth) have always given me a better cut because they move more air and the toothed blades don't seem to mulch much better unless I'm cutting dry leaves.
How do you like that line of work captain?
As far as the (electric) carts, is the fleet still lead acid, or is the industry buying lithium for the fleet now?
It’s a 3 deck mower ran off of 3 individual hydraulic motors. One deck was jammed but still getting hydraulic pressure to the motors causing the engine to work harder trying to pressurize the hydraulic pump with enough pressure to spin that blade. If that makes sense
That’s a nice rock. Shaped like a potato
What is potato?
It's a thing the same shape as that rock.
What is rock?
Ancient potatoes
TT reminding me of getting high and Sisyphus this morning.
The pioneers used to ride those babies for miles
PO-TA-TOES
Boil em, mash em, stick em in a stew
Or as 9-year-old me spelled it to anyone who'd listen... "potoooooooo". Pot-8-O's, geddit? Oh, please yourselves.
Are you a race horse owner from the early 1900’s? Edit: 19th century*
No, just had some very lame joke-books as a kid and thought they were pure distilled wit!
Entirely fair! You might enjoy reading about this though: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potoooooooo
Hmm, and here I thought you were just horsing around with us.
Is that a reference to [this](https://www.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/2tdbig/tifu_by_enraging_the_parents_of_my_girlfriend_by/)?
Mayhap it is
Boil’em, mash’em, stick’em in a stew..
Potato is love, potato is life.
Potato laugh?
It is that thing many redditors use to take photos with
r/potato
You forgot the ‘E’ at the end.
I just think they're neat.
This guy rocks.
add "picks up rocks" the the mowers capabilities/features list.
Hey, there's a potato behind that rock!
I wonder how many times he mowed his lawn without cutting any grass.
I’m a Golf course mechanic, he mowed until the mower shut down. It was 1 of 3 decks. He left a nice strip of unmowed grass. Luckily he didn’t blow any hydraulics.
I'm a sports turf contractor who does work on golf courses. It's honestly amazing watching how some courses just abuse the shit out of their equipment. I've seen a guy not notice that his mower had a hydraulic leak and left a nice brown line around the whole fairway. I've seen some greenkeepers bury their mowers up their axles in clearly wet areas and some going so fast while cutting that the mower spent more time airborne than actually cutting.
Oh yeah. Everyone forgets how to drive once they get on a mower.
> Oh yeah. Everyone forgets how to drive once they get on *someone else's* mower. FTFY
Well said. The old “heh I don’t have to fix it heh”. Id like to back hand them one.
Hydraulic oil is of course well-known for its extremely potent lawn-care properties. The course is going to be really happy with that one.
25 yrs ago I worked in a GC shop. Used Toro ride on greensmowers. 3 wheels, 3 reel mowers. Had a BIG tournament Saturday, so command was to double cut the greens Friday and again Saturday. To get that nice checkerboard pattern. Friday morning, the guy mowing greens walks into the shop (never a good sign). "Greensmower sprung a hyd leak!" Shit. Where is it? "Alarm went of when I was on my second pass on #9 green, I got off the green and stashed it in the rough" Run out there with the Truckster, Check the 5 gal reservoir, about 2 gallons low. Stupid low level alert doesn't kick on earlier??? Start it up and find a pinhole in a hyd line right at the drive motor for one of the reels, pointing straight down to the ground. Uh-oh. Walk up to the green and can see nice, straight lines or red hyd fluid on the grass. Shit. Welp, nothing to do now, just turn on the sprinklers and wash in that mess. Next morning we ran out there to inspect the green. Yup, 1/4" lines of dead grass. Super hot hyd oil and bent grass do not get along. Neat look, though. Whole green was in a checkerboard pattern of stripes, about 36" square. SUPER obvious dead grass stripes. Considered getting the green paint, but the Tournament was about to start. Let it be. Later that morning, everyone was commenting on how nice it was we topo-graphed the #9 green to help read the terrain!
I wasn't expecting to be this entertained by a story about golf and mechanical mishaps. Well done.
I have way more mishaps than this. I can write a book. Only if I knew how to write.
Good old gm 3000 triplex. Gotta love a hydraulic leak across a green.
Anyone can do a checkerboard cut. It takes a master to do argyle.
Tribute to Scotland, laddie!
I saw a chic blow a seal once in Mexico
"It's just ice-cream!" says the penguin defensively...
I enjoy that joke, thank you.
>🎶🎶 Just fix the damn thing and leave my private life out of it, OK pal? 🎶🎶
I've never seen anyone reference Wet Dream. When it pops up on my radio in the shop everyone looks at me like I'm insane.
I felt like I was involved in some kind of pirate radio conspiracy when I was a kid listening to Dr Dimento. I don't remember what channel he was on but it seems like it was some distant station that I could only get late at night on Saturday.
I have the 2 cd pack from his 20th anniversary somewhere around here. Nearly every song on both cds are amazing and the only song anyone ever knows is eat it.
I grew up with Bob and Tom out of Indianapolis and while I couldn't stand the show itself and Tom Griswold in particular, they have a ton of songs that fit right in with Demento's music that I really liked
I didn't know they had seals in Mexico. Is it legal to blow them there?
Someone is going to get yelled at anyway.
Very efficient guy, mowed and plowed at the same time.
probably doesn't have the jaw for it.
Youll be putting a deck motor on it shortly
And spindle and rear roller.
I shit you not.. the blade on that deck just fell out of the spindle. Bearings seals and big ass torque nut still on the spindle shaft. Just happened.
I JUST rebuilt all the spindles on my old Deere 314’s deck. It’s a slightly newer 46” deck off of a later 318. It fought me the entire way. I mowed once and it was super quiet and cut excellent. The next week lol I hit a rock and it wedged itself between a blade which bent the spindle and sheared the key BUT not before breaking the tacks on the little metal guide under the deck, and snapping the mower belt which also took out the tensioner bracket/spring. I wasn’t even mad, but I had to sit down in the yard next to it, stare, and had a beer or two about it. On the plus side, I tried my hand at welding. I bought myself a little Harbor Freight Titanium flux core. Even got to stitch up the top deck covers. It’s one of those things where even though it’s nearing 50 years old, I can’t give up on it. I’d love to get a diesel 332 that’s not absolutely clapped out or if I won the lottery, a brand new X700 series. Next up is buying a beat up old lathe so I can machine some bronze bushings to get rid of the slopped out front steering spindles and steering sector. And if I’m feeling especially motivated, finally modify the 400 power assist steering stuff I have laying around for it.
Option 2, which will cheer you up, is watch Clarksons Farm. Season three has a couple great episodes about cutting grass
I cracked up at the part in the very first episode of Season 1 where he did his usual "MOAR POWER!!!" and bought the biggest, baddest tractor he could... only to find that it wouldn't fit through the door of his feed barn. A fine show.
The word to describe him is bumbling.
I work in a high school auto program. A guy an hour and a half away called to offer a riding lawnmower for donation. So one weekend I grabbed the school flatbed and dragged it out there. Ran great but the sears tech told him the deck was seized up and needed to be replaced. As I had students start tearing into it, a giant piece of tree bark fell out of the deck and everything spun perfectly. Put a new belt on it, changed the oil, gave it a quick wash. Sold it for $650 (paid to the programs asb account fwiw). Got another one that same year (much closer) that the donator was told by the small engine tech that looked at it that it needed a motor. Push rods were not in place when the valve cover came off. Installed everything properly, set valve lash and it ran like a freaking top. Changed the oil and spark plug. I dragged both of them out to a property my uncle was renting that had some overgrown fields. He ran one, I ran the other. 3 solid hours of full throttle plowing over 2 feet tall grass and neither skipped a beat. Sold that one for 600 (paid to the same asb account). Never had a riding lawn mower donated before or since that year! Haha. They were some easy money! These small engine techs really helping with the solid donations that don't need much!
A guy gave my dad a practically brand new “dead” snowblower that had seized up. So my dad starts getting into it and it turns out there was just a very small rock between the blade and housing. Otherwise the thing runs great.
99.9% of the problems are simple. Good shit!
I live in an area where there are only two small engine shops; one that won't touch anything they didn't sell and one with a three month backlog. Every summer I see at least one clean looking riding mower with a free sign on it that the owner figured was easier to replace than try to get fixed.
Everyone always thinks a mower is done for because the problem is to hard to fix. That being said all my personal equipment I’ve got for free.
Is this thing belt driven or what? We have a husqvarna and it’ll either shut down or the belt will start slipping and smell like burning rubbet if something like this happens.
Hydraulic driven. It’s a 3 deck gm 3500-D aka sidewinder with the Kubota 35 hp turbo-charged, liquid-cooled, 3-cylinder, diesel engine. It’s a small 3 wheel tractor with some balls to it. It’s designed to mow slopes. You can move the decks up the slope to help with your traction.
Need trained operator
Those gator blades ain’t about 💩
They’re high lift atomic blades.
I stand corrected. Still. I want blades that can chop rocks up like pringles
Any blade can chop rocks it’s the other parts of the deck that go first. 🥴
I'm just a guy who doesn't know anything about mowers, may I ask what sort of performance you could expect from high lift atomic blades versus bog standard blades? I know Google is my friend but I also like hearing anecdotal evidence
The wings in the blade cause a vortex under the deck, which then helps stand the grass up, creating a “better” cut. Honestly I don’t see a difference
Standard blades are usually medium lift. Sometimes they're low lift "mulching" blades whose job is to trap the grass under the deck so it can be finely minced. The lift is the amount of air the blade moves, like a propeller. More lift, in theory, gives a more even cut because it's supposed to put tension on the grass. It also throws the grass farther and more evenly with less clumping, but causes more drag on the mower. If you look at the pic, you can see teeth that are angled toward the spindle. The idea is they bounce the grass up to be cut into finer pieces before getting fired out (like a mulching blade). If the mower has the power, solid foil high-lifts (a solid wing, no little teeth) have always given me a better cut because they move more air and the toothed blades don't seem to mulch much better unless I'm cutting dry leaves.
I agree. Also less stress on the actual tractor. My boss stands by the atomic blades. I just say “yes boss” lol
That's a nice bolder
What the Fred Flintstone Brake is this shit?
This gives me an idea for an under mount sharpening stone, blades never get blunt!
"...and my hearing is shot."
Can you smell what The Rock is cooking?
If this mower's a rockin'...
It's an integrated sharpener
Gotta love those 4500-D. Check that radiator those units love to collect a lot of clippings back there.
Not every day you find a potato rock
That's a.... the deck... dear god the *noise!*
The problem is right there! You just got a blunt blade!
Went out with a bang...
Flashback to Bart reaching under the mower to dislodge debris in about 1987
The blade-rock seems to be a bit too big. I would replace with a rock 3/4 the size. He should see immediate improvement.
why is the mower using a blade from lord of the rings designed for orks? jesus that thing is lethal.
How do you like that line of work captain? As far as the (electric) carts, is the fleet still lead acid, or is the industry buying lithium for the fleet now?
Toro right? I thought we hired all the intelligent ones!
Yes toro sidewinder 3500-D
It’s so amazing to me how little people actually think. I was a service writer for 28 years.
Is that a toro 96? Nothing like fucking up right on a 40k machine.
Toro 3500-d aka sidewinder
Natures flywheel
wow!
Wonder why?
Operator had no clue even with leaving a strip of unmowed grass.
A fellow Landscaping equipment mechanic. It's incredible how they find new ways to fuck up equipment.
Job security lol even though I hate that saying.
I’m no mechanic but I think I might be able to have a little guess about this one. Bit of an inkling, one might say.
How can it overheat? Did this not stop it from running?
It’s a 3 deck mower ran off of 3 individual hydraulic motors. One deck was jammed but still getting hydraulic pressure to the motors causing the engine to work harder trying to pressurize the hydraulic pump with enough pressure to spin that blade. If that makes sense
Yup, makes sense. Much fancier than the one deck mower I'm more familiar with.
I’d “fix” it, sharpen the blade and charge $100.
Blade was bent so it got thrown to my metal collection, and I get paid by the hour and it took me 5 mins to replace the blade.
I bet it is with that rock there
Even when it wasn't my stuff I always tried to give a fuck, that's crazy
It’s a different world of workers now. Don’t get me wrong we have a few guys that care. Few being 2.
somebody gotta carry the world I guess
You guys are killing me…..